Eurofound: EU home-working doubled to 22% by 2024, Luxembourg leads at 41%

The share of EU employees working from home at least sometimes rose from 8% in 2015 to 22% in 2024, according to Eurofound’s report Working anytime, anywhere: The quality of working time in the EU, published on 30 July 2026 and drawing on the European Working Conditions Survey 2024. One in five EU workers now teleworks or has a flexitime arrangement.

The country spread is wide. Luxembourg leads at 41%, followed by the Netherlands and Sweden (both 38%) and Ireland (29%). At the other end, Romania sits at 4%, Italy at 6%, Hungary at 7% and Bulgaria at 8%. The steepest rises since 2015 were in Luxembourg (up 30 percentage points), Germany (up 26) and Belgium and Finland (each up 22).

Why this matters

If you are planning a cross-border move, these figures tell you where remote working is a normal expectation and where it is still an exception. The same job title can be remote-default in Luxembourg or the Netherlands and office-first in Romania or Italy. Local norms shape what you can actually negotiate with an employer, and they change what a “remote job in Europe” realistically looks like from one country to the next. Eurofound’s dataset is the authoritative baseline for that comparison.

The report also flags the trade-offs. Flexible working improves work-life balance for many, but it carries risks of irregular hours and always-on contact, and the uptake of right-to-disconnect protections remains uneven across member states. That tension between autonomy and boundary-setting is the throughline of Eurofound’s 2024 evidence.

What to watch

Eurofound published three companion working papers alongside the main report (a literature review, a commuting and time-use paper, and an effects paper), all dated 21 July 2026, which add country-level and methodological depth for anyone using these figures in detail.